What is your opinion on the 2008 WSOP Main Event?

The most hyped WSOP Final Table ever is finally over and the 22-year old Danish player Peter Eastgate defeated Russia's Ivan Demidov, winning $9,152,416.
Now we ask you if you enjoyed the final table action: was it what you expected, were you disappointed with the players or you simply didn't care enough to follow the event?

Eastgate definitely was a much more "deserving" winner than Jerry Yang who got lucky all the way to the title. (Although anyone who can last that long deserves to win the title) I saw the final table games, and Eastgate played some solid poker.

I think having the WSOP being so hyped is good for the game, it just brings in more people to play the game, and the more people who play it, the more fish there is for us

I was watching some live pokerstars tourney a month or so ago (can't remember which one was it) and it had live video stream of the final table over the internet (no hole cards) and it was 1000x better.

And the WSOP coverage consists of 20% poker play, 20% fans shouting, 20% of player biography stuff and 40% of random stuff like showing phil helmuth 10 times or whatever. I'm lucky I watched it without the commercials, that would have killed me

I don't have much against fans shouting (that was pretty nice actually), some bio and some random stuff but you have to show more poker play. This was a huge disappointment for me.

i think its live on PPV, if they showed all the hands on the TV Show, 90% of the ppl watching would be bored to death and sweat not to play poker again! The editing makes it look all exciting and fun to the potential fish

The EPT is sponsered, taped, (and organized?) by pokerstars. All pokerstars wants is more attention no matter how, cause their brand shows up anywhere.
And since watching online on pokerstars.tv brings you even closer to pokerstars.com then TV, they have all the reasons to make a great internet broadcast.
So they have great live internet coverage, televised shows in some country's, etc.

The WSOP is sponsered by all kinds of things, like planters and Milwaukee's Best Light, wich only gets attention by television.
It is taped and sponsered by ESPN too, and they want to show the public every 5 minutes a commercial. Wich is hardly doable on the internet.
The only one who has an interest in a free internet broadcast is bwin, but they are just one of many sponsors who all need to be satisfied, so they got the audio rights.

The show itself is all you can expect. It's america, they want hero's, anti-hero's and fireworks. And that's what they get.
A lot of key-hands are shown, some interviews, some flashbacks... You can't push much more into 45 minutes.

Well, I was a bit steamy apparently
I agree with most of what you say and totally agree it would be really boring to watch all the hands but still I just want to say that they should have showed 3x more hands than they did. Maybe cut out some random stuff and it would have fitted into 4 episodes instead of 2. There would still be a show and maybe you would understand why all the insane bluffs were made and other things. Because now those few hands they did show come out of nowhere.

Was disappointed in espns coverage of heads up play, only showing 2 hands. Due to this it appears as if Demidov got completely owned. The several hours of radio broadcast would tell differently, Demidov played very well against Eastgates not so aggressive play.

Other than this I enjoyed the whole series. Was good to watch HORSE final table, good change from watching Hold'em all the time.

I don't think 3x times the hands would be any better to understand the table history. But the headsup is kinda weak indeed. Headsup hands don't last that long anyway, so there could be a couple more hands in there.

The heads-up match was between the 2 best players, so either way it went, a good pokerplayer was going to win.